If you know my mom at all, you know she loves to cook, bake, prepare foods, and in general create in the kitchen. While I didn't quite inherit her zeal for being in the kitchen...I do enjoy baking (when cranky babies allow) and having homemade food for my family.
One of the things my Italian mama always made from scratch growing up was pizza dough. And besides being delicious it's also, of course, less expensive to make it yourself than to buy it. A bag of flour is about $1.50 and so is one ball of pre-made dough. So...if you feel like making your own pizza dough, here is her recipe....
JoJo's Pizza Dough (makes 2 pizzas)
4 cups all purpose flour
1 1/3 cups warm water
1 tablespoon (fast rising) yeast
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
Dissolve yeast in warm water for a few minutes.
Add remaining ingredients and mix together/knead briefly.
Let rise for 30 minutes.
Divide dough in half and spread onto two greased pans (adding a pinch of extra flour as needed to help with stickiness).
Bake at 450 degrees for 10-20 minutes (check often)
Today my 3 year old told me he really wanted to make pizza. He got out his tiny rolling pin and everything. So.... I switched a few things around on our menu plan for the month and made it happen. He loves baking projects (which are harder with a baby around) and I'm quite confident that he will bake wonderful treats for his future wife someday.
Here is Mateo spreading out our dough. Though a rolling pin is not necessary, he sure got
excited to use his!
And the only thing more fun than spreading out the dough is adding (and sampling) the ingredients. Mateo is learning all about shapes right now so after taking a bite out of his "circle" pepperoni he then declared it was a "crescent moon". He cracks me up. But anytime this skinny picky eater gets excited about food and food preparation I try to capitalize on that as best I can.
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